It’s the longest I’ve been away from home in years, although some of that time was spent working from my “second” home in Ireland, where I was a resident for five years.

All told I’ve spent nearly three months total in China alone in the past year. It’s been rewarding learning so much from my Chinese colleagues and friends.

Here are a few pics from various meetings and events with registrars and others in the domain biz in China over the past few months. Some of the friendliest and hardest working people you’ll ever meet in the domain name industry.

Attendance was reported to be over 300 (triple vs. last year), consisting of registry operators, registrars, domain investors, the media and representatives from MIIT, CAICT, ISC and ICANN.

There were plenty of content and networking opportunities to keep one busy the entire day. This is just a partial list of some of the topics that were covered:

Domain Name Industry Regulation. Review of 2016 and outlook for 2017.

Internet development trends in China

Domain industry development trends in China

UASG: Where are we now.

Report on Chinese IDN Universal Acceptance

Roundtable: Domain names in the new era

TLD entry license and review

Evolution of DNS structure and security practices at China Telecom

Trends of new gTLDs in the China Market

Analysis of the Digital Assets ecosystem and its future

Our CEO, Mr. Arto Isokoski, presented on “Providing innovation to the Chinese domain name marketplace.” He offered comments on the China opportunity, the importance of the digital economy, and upcoming Chinese IDN email initiatives.

As at any domain name conference, one of the best benefits of attending is the opportunity to network! There was no shortage of opportunities to do so in Beijing, especially at dinner, where many of the “who’s who” of the China domain name industry were on hand to talk shop and visit with old and new friends.

In addition to the photos posted above, we’ve also created a short 3 1/2 minute video and photo montage to give you a taste of our day at the conference. We look forward to participating again! Enjoy.

*The following is a courtesy republishing of an original blog post at ChopChop.news

With an entirely new year ahead of us, a lot of speculation, strategizing, and planning will be an integral role for domain investors while looking forward to the attractiveness and potential held by the Chinese e-commerce market.

So what sort of strategies do domain investors apply when forecasting the domain market in China or otherwise?

Well, there are several methods to employ when determining the value of a domain name, and many prominent domain investors make their money by applying these various methods and investing in domains that fit the criteria of what makes a domain name valuable. The ins-and-outs of how to value a domain name would require a blog post of its own, so I won’t go into detail here, however I will go over one key indicator of determining the value of domain name: keyword search volume.

Specific keywords or key phrases that receive, say, millions of exact-match searches per month will almost always be more valuable than a different keyword or key phrase that only receives, say a few thousand exact-match searches per month among the bevy of search engines, including Baidu, which is the most popular search engine used in China.Exact-match and generic keywords derive value from simple supply and demand– there is only a limited supply of meaningful, relevant, and powerful keywords and key phrases in the human vocabulary, therefore the more “exact” or “generic” it is, the more likely people are to search for it (demand) on Google or Baidu, increasing its value.

In other words, website owners generally want to see a high volume of traffic to their site, and if their domain name contains a valuable keyword or key phrase to the left of the dot, the more likely someone will search for it on a search engine, or by directly typing it in as a URL, resulting in a higher number of people visiting the website about the exact thing they may be looking for.

Unfortunately, most, if not all valuable exact-match and generic keywords and key phrases used to the left of the .COM extension are likely registered, and probably have been for many years. Typically, in today’s overly-saturated .COM domain market, the only way to acquire meaningful exact-match and generic keyword domain names is to pay an exorbitant amount of money to the domain owner. That is not an option for everyone. Thankfully, the expansion of over 1,500 new domain extensions and counting have helped to mitigate the high costs of generic and exact-match .COM domain names. Now, business owners large and small, domain investors, and everyday internet users can register meaningful exact-match and generic keyword domains that end in something other than the “legacy” domain extensions, at a cost that is comparatively miniscule.

After taking a look at a nice infographic about 2016’s top-searched keywords and key phrases from Baidu, we found that these most searched terms have received hundreds of millions of views over the last 12 months, and many of these terms are still available to register in both .在线 and .中文网!

See below for a breakdown of the keyword or key phrase, how many hits it receives in Baidu every month, and its price. DO NOT miss out on the opportunity to register these domain names!

Domain: 房价.在线
Translation: House Price
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 100 Million
Context: “Soaring House Prices” keyphrase was #2 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.

Domain: 民间借贷.在线
Translation: Micro-Finance
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 50 Million
Context: The same key phrase as before, “Internet Finance” was #8 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.

Some other top-searched keywords and phrases in 2016 coming from Baidu, costing even less than the premium domains above, include:

All of the above domain names are available, cost-effective, and extremely powerful exact-match keywords and phrases that millions to hundreds of millions of searches in Baidu, thus making them very valuable digital commodities.

These domain names are sound investments for the sole reason that the search volume is in the top-tier, and people are simply searching for these words in Baidu at an extraordinarily high rate. People clearly want to find websites about the keywords they are searching for, so make your business stand out above the rest with an exact-match, fully Chinese domain name!

– ChopChop Domains Team

*The above is a courtesy republishing of an original blog post at ChopChop.news

According to a Wikipedia entry: “EAI enables users to have a localized [email] address in a native language script or character set, as well as an ASCII form for communicating with legacy systems or for script-independent use. Applications that recognize internationalized domain names and mail addresses must have facilities to convert these representations.

Significant demand for such addresses is expected in China, Japan, Russia, and other markets that have large user bases in a non-Latin-based writing system.”

My long-term favorable view on IDNs and in general being long on investment in this area remains.

I always get a charge out of listening to the Domain Sherpas. This week’s show was no exception. I take stock in the unique perspectives on domain industry news and trends provided by the guest “Sherpas,” even if I don’t always agree.

At about 54 minutes into the video there is welcome discussion about recent and potentially far-reaching IDN email developments, especially as it relates to Google’s decision to support fully IDN email addresses. There was also good mention of ChineseLandRush.com by one of the Sherpas. That’s a site developed and managed by TLD Registry Limited, a client and operator of the Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) newtop level domains.

ChineseLandRush.com is designed to help domain investors register great Chinese IDNs without having to know a word of Chinese. All names shown on the fresh version 2.0 of the site are General Availability (GA) names anyone can snap up on a first-come, first-served basis at regular GA prices via the many registrars offering registration of these IDNs.

Each day the list is hand-refreshed by a team of Chinese experts. No auto-name spinning bots here—just real people throwing out real-life name suggestions by popular categories.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on the ChineseLandRush.com project alongside my colleagues at TLD Registry, and we’ll continue to develop that tool further in the quest to make Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) the easiest new IDN gTLDs for domain investors anywhere to work with on a consistent basis.